Courtesy | Michigan Department of CorrectionsTJ Tremble, now 30, is serving mandatory life sentences, for two killings when he was 14. He is in the highest security level at Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in Ionia County.

MLive.com file photoT. J. James Tremble, then 15, is led out of Arenac County Circuit Court in 1997 following his sentences to mandatory life in the killings of Peter and Ruth Stanley, 71.

A U.S. appeals court has reinstated juvenile lifer TJ Tremble’s mandatory life sentence for killing an elderly couple when he was 14.

But the appeals panel reversed that decision, saying the lower court fell “prey” to an unsubstantiated allegation that police continued to question Tremble hours after he signed a document asking for a lawyer.

The panel also said state attorneys were “hardly diligent in allowing Tremble’s allegation to go unchallenged.”

“This choice created a situation in which the district court’s error more easily occurred,” Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote for the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Sixth Circuit.

Dennis Stanley, whose parents were killed in the Saginaw Bay-area community of Au Gres, said family members had “cautious optimism” the decision would be reversed.

“But it was always there for two years. It’s been a weight on our back and it’s gone,” said Stanley, who praised “relentless” efforts by the attorney general’s office.

Michigan Department of CorrectionsTJ Tremble, seen here in 2009, is now 30. He is at the highest security level at Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in Ionia County.

“To know there’s been that much time and money put into this, it’s hard to imagine. Society is safer. He can’t harm anybody.”

Tremble was an eighth-grader the night authorities say he rode his bike to the home of Ruth and Peter Stanley, both 71, and shot them in their bedroom with a .22-caliber rifle on April 19, 1997.

He was arrested a short time later, when a deputy found him by their car in the ditch. At first Tremble said he merely stole the car, but eventually admitted killing the Stanleys, records show.

A new law allowed 14-year-olds in serious crimes to be tried as adults at the prosecutor’s choice. Tremble was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole.

His appeals have bounced around various courts for 15 years. The latest centered partly on when Tremble signed a document declaring he wanted an attorney. The action is supposed to stop police questioning.

The document shows it was signed by Tremble at 4:05, but it does not say whether it was 4:05 a.m. or 4:05 p.m. Tremble confessed at 8:30 a.m., records show.

The series chronicled the crimes of nearly two dozen juvenile lifers, then ages 17 to 67. Some were accomplices who did not commit the actual crime.

Defense lawyers in Michigan are pushing for re-sentencing hearings. One is scheduled next week in Kent County for getaway driver Saulo Montalvo, who was outside when teen accomplices robbed and killed a party store clerk.

Schuette believes the high court’s ruling should not be retroactive and has asked the Michigan Supreme Court to weigh in.

“We just have to be confident that again the law of reason will prevail here, and perhaps those won’t be retroactive,” Dennis Stanley said. “That’s all we’re hoping for.”